As she went down the staircase later, on her way to dinner,
Miss Vanderpoel saw on all sides signs of the extent of the
nakedness of the land. She was in a fine old house, stripped of
most of its saleable belongings, uncared for, deteriorating year
by year, gradually going to ruin. One need not possess
particular keenness of sight to observe this, and she had chanced
to see old houses in like condition in other countries than
England. A man-servant, in a shabby livery, opened the drawing-
room door for her. He was not a picturesque servitor of fallen
fortunes, but an awkward person who was not accustomed to
his duties. Betty wondered if he had been called in from the
gardens to meet the necessities of the moment. His furtive
glance at the tall young woman who passed him, took in with
sudden embarrassment the fact that she plainly did not belong
to the dispirited world bounded by Stornham Court. Without
sparkling gems or trailing richness in her wake, she was
suggestively splendid. He did not know whether it was her hair
or the build of her neck and shoulders that did it, but it was
revealed to him that tiaras and collars of stones which blazed
belonged without doubt to her equipment. He recalled that
there was a legend to the effect that the present Lady
Anstruthers, who looked like a rag doll, had been the daughter of
a rich American, and that better things might have been expected
of her if she had not been such a poor-spirited creature.
If this was her sister, she perhaps was a young woman of
fortune, and that she was not of poor spirit was plain.

The large drawing-room presented but another aspect of
the bareness of the rest of the house. In times probably long
past, possibly in the Dowager Lady Anstruthers' early years
of marriage, the walls had been hung with white and gold
paper of a pattern which dominated the scene, and had been
furnished with gilded chairs, tables, and ottomans. Some of
these last had evidently been removed as they became too much
out of repair for use or ornament. Such as remained, tarnished
as to gilding and worn in the matter of upholstery, stood
sparsely scattered on a desert of carpet, whose huge, flowered
medallions had faded almost from view.

Lady Anstruthers, looking shy and awkward as she fingered
an ornament on a small table, seemed singularly a part of her
background. Her evening dress, slipping off her thin shoulders,
was as faded and out of date as her carpet. It had once been
delicately blue and gauzy, but its gauziness hung in crushed
folds and its blue was almost grey. It was also the dress of
a girl, not that of a colourless, worn woman, and her
consciousness of its unfitness showed in her small-featured face
as she came forward.

"Do you--recognise it, Betty?" she asked hesitatingly. "It
was one of my New York dresses. I put it on because--
because----" and her stammering ended helplessly.

"Because you wanted to remind me," Betty said. If she
felt it easier to begin with an excuse she should be provided
with one.

Perhaps but for this readiness to fall into any tone she chose
to adopt Rosy might have endeavoured to carry her poor
farce on, but as it was she suddenly gave it up.

"I put it on because I have no other," she said. "We never
have visitors and I haven't dressed for dinner for so long that
I seem to have nothing left that is fit to wear. I dragged this
out because it was better than anything else. It was pretty
once----" she gave a little laugh, "twelve years ago. How long
years seem! Was I--was I pretty, Betty--twelve years ago?"

"Twelve years is not such a long time." Betty took her hand and
drew her to a sofa. "Let us sit down and talk about it."

"There is nothing much to talk about. This is it----"
taking in the room with a wave of her hand. "I am it.
Ughtred is it."

"Then let us talk about England," was Bettina's light skim
over the thin ice.

A red spot grew on each of Lady Anstruthers' cheek bones
and made her faded eyes look intense.

"Let us talk about America," her little birdclaw of a hand
clinging feverishly. "Is New York still--still----"

"It is still there," Betty answered with one of the adorable
smiles which showed a deep dimple near her lip. "But it is
much nearer England than it used to be."

Betty bent rather suddenly and kissed her. It was the easiest
way of hiding the look she knew had risen to her eyes.
She began to talk gaily, half laughingly.

"It is quite near," she said. "Don't you realise it?
Americans swoop over here by thousands every year. They come
for business, they come for pleasure, they come for rest. They
cannot keep away. They come to buy and sell--pictures and
books and luxuries and lands. They come to give and take.
They are building a bridge from shore to shore of their work,
and their thoughts, and their plannings, out of the lives and
souls of them. It will be a great bridge and great things
will pass over it." She kissed the faded cheek again. She
wanted to sweep Rosy away from the dreariness of "it." Lady
Anstruthers looked at her with faintly smiling eyes. She did
not follow all this quite readily, but she felt pleased and
vaguely comforted.

"I know how they come here and marry," she said. "The
new Duchess of Downes is an American. She had a fortune
of two million pounds."

"If she chooses to rebuild a great house and a great name,"
said Betty, lifting her shoulders lightly, "why not--if it is an
honest bargain? I suppose it is part of the building of the
bridge."

Little Lady Anstruthers, trying to pull up the sleeves of
the gauzy bodice slipping off her small, sharp bones, stared at
her half in wondering adoration, half in alarm.

"Betty--you--you are so handsome--and so clever and
strange," she fluttered. "Oh, Betty, stand up so that I can
see how tall and handsome you are!"

Betty did as she was told, and upon her feet she was a young
woman of long lines, and fine curves so inspiring to behold that
Lady Anstruthers clasped her hands together on her knees in
an excited gesture.

"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!" she cried. "You are just as
wonderful as you looked when I turned and saw you under the
trees. You almost make me afraid."

"Because I am wonderful?" said Betty. "Then I will not
be wonderful any more."

"It is not because I think you wonderful, but because other
people will. Would you rebuild a great house?" hesitatingly.

"How could the man who owned it persuade me that he
was in earnest if he said he loved me? How could I persuade
him that I was worth caring for and not a mere ambitious fool?
There would be too much against us."

"I don't say I am fair," said Betty. "People who are
proud are often not fair. But we should both of us have seen
and known too much."

"You have seen me now," said Lady Anstruthers in her
listless voice, and at the same moment dinner was announced
and she got up from the sofa, so that, luckily, there was no
time for the impersonal answer it would have been difficult to
invent at a moment's notice. As they went into the dining-
room Betty was thinking restlessly. She remembered all the
material she had collected during her education in France and
Germany, and there was added to it the fact that she had
seen Rosy, and having her before her eyes she felt that there
was small prospect of her contemplating the rebuilding of any
great house requiring reconstruction.

There was fine panelling in the dining-room and a great
fireplace and a few family portraits. The service upon the
table was shabby and the dinner was not a bounteous meal.
Lady Anstruthers in her girlish, gauzy dress and looking too
small for her big, high-backed chair tried to talk rapidly, and
every few minutes forgot herself and sank into silence, with
her eyes unconsciously fixed upon her sister's face. Ughtred
watched Betty also, and with a hungry questioning. The man-
servant in the worn livery was not a sufficiently well-trained
and experienced domestic to make any effort to keep his eyes
from her. He was young enough to be excited by an innovation
so unusual as the presence of a young and beautiful
person surrounded by an unmistakable atmosphere of ease and
fearlessness. He had been talking of her below stairs and felt
that he had failed in describing her. He had found himself
barely supported by the suggestion of a housemaid that sometimes
these dresses that looked plain had been made in Paris
at expensive places and had cost "a lot." He furtively
examined the dress which looked plain, and while he admitted that
for some mysterious reason it might represent expensiveness, it
was not the dress which was the secret of the effect, but a
something, not altogether mere good looks, expressed by the
wearer. It was, in fact, the thing which the second-class
passenger, Salter, had been at once attracted and stirred to
rebellion by when Miss Vanderpoel came on board the Meridiana.

Betty did not look too small for her high-backed chair, and
she did not forget herself when she talked. In spite of all
she had found, her imagination was stirred by the surroundings.
Her sense of the fine spaces and possibilities of dignity
in the barren house, her knowledge that outside the windows
there lay stretched broad views of the park and its heavy-
branched trees, and that outside the gates stood the neglected
picturesqueness of the village and all the rural and--to her--
interesting life it slowly lived--this pleased and attracted her.

If she had been as helpless and discouraged as Rosalie she could
see that it would all have meant a totally different and
depressing thing, but, strong and spirited, and with the power
of full hands, she was remotely rejoicing in what might be done
with it all. As she talked she was gradually learning detail.
Sir Nigel was on the Continent. Apparently he often went
there; also it revealed itself that no one knew at what moment
he might return, for what reason he would return, or if he
would return at all during the summer. It was evident that
no one had been at any time encouraged to ask questions as to
his intentions, or to feel that they had a right to do so.

This she knew, and a number of other things, before they left the
table. When they did so they went out to stroll upon the
moss-grown stone terrace and listened to the nightingales
throwingminto the air silver fountains of trilling song. When
Bettinapaused, leaning against the balustrade of the terrace that
she might hear all the beauty of it, and feel all the beauty of
the warm spring night, Rosy went on making her effort to talk.

"It is not much of a neighbourhood, Betty," she said. "You
are too accustomed to livelier places to like it."

"That is my reason for feeling that I shall like it. I don't
think I could be called a lively person, and I rather hate
lively places."

"But you are accustomed--accustomed----" Rosy harked
back uncertainly.

"I have been accustomed to wishing that I could come to
you," said Betty. "And now I am here."

"No one knows. To Australia or somewhere. He has odd
ideas. The Mount Dunstans have been awful people for two
generations. This man's father was almost mad with wickedness.
So was the elder son. This is a second son, and he came
into nothing but debt. Perhaps he feels the disgrace and it
makes him rude and ill-tempered. His father and elder brother
had been in such scandals that people did not invite them.

"Are you? It would be twelve miles--there and back. When I was
in New York people didn't walk much, particularly girls."

"They do now," Betty answered. "They have learned to
do it in England. They live out of doors and play games.
They have grown athletic and tall."

As they talked the nightingales sang, sometimes near,
sometimes in the distance, and scents of dewy grass and leaves
and earth were wafted towards them. Sometimes they strolled up
and down the terrace, sometimes they paused and leaned
against the stone balustrade. Betty allowed Rosy to talk as
she chose. She herself asked no obviously leading questions and
passed over trying moments with lightness. Her desire was
to place herself in a position where she might hear the things
which would aid her to draw conclusions. Lady Anstruthers
gradually grew less nervous and afraid of her subjects. In the
wonder of the luxury of talking to someone who listened
with sympathy, she once or twice almost forgot herself and
made revelations she had not intended to make. She had often
the manner of a person who was afraid of being overheard;
sometimes, even when she was making speeches quite simple in
themselves, her voice dropped and she glanced furtively aside
as if there were chances that something she dreaded might step
out of the shadow.

When they went upstairs together and parted for the night, the
clinging of Rosy's embrace was for a moment almost convulsive.
But she tried to laugh off its suggestion of intensity.

"I held you tight so that I could feel sure that you were
real and would not melt away," she said. "I hope you will
be here in the morning."

"I shall never really go quite away again, now I have come,"
Betty answered. "It is not only your house I have come into.
I have come back into your life."

After she had entered her room and locked the door she
sat down and wrote a letter to her father. It was a long
letter, but a clear one. She painted a definite and detailed
picture and made distinct her chief point.

"She is afraid of me," she wrote. "That is the first and
worst obstacle. She is actually afraid that I will do something
which will only add to her trouble. She has lived under
dominion so long that she has forgotten that there are people
who have no reason for fear. Her old life seems nothing but
a dream. The first thing I must teach her is that I am to
be trusted not to do futile things, and that she need neither be
afraid of nor for me."

After writing these sentences she found herself leaving her
desk and walking up and down the room to relieve herself.
She could not sit still, because suddenly the blood ran fast and
hot through her veins. She put her hands against her cheeks
and laughed a little, low laugh.

"I feel violent," she said. "I feel violent and I must get
over it. This is rage. Rage is worth nothing."

It was rage--the rage of splendid hot blood which surged
in answer to leaping hot thoughts. There would have been a
sort of luxury in giving way to the sway of it. But the self-
indulgence would have been no aid to future action. Rage
was worth nothing. She said it as the first Reuben Vanderpoel
might have said of a useless but glittering weapon. "This gun
is worth nothing," and cast it aside.